As antisemitism flourished in Germany during the first few decades of the last century it became increasingly 'scientific', which in practice meant that the underlying prejudice was coated with a growing corpus of bogus academic interpretations.
In today's America, where ignorance has gained the same kind of prestige that science and medicine once had in early twentieth century Germany, the requirement to appear knowledgeable whilst being openly bigoted has been softened, to say the least.
To wit, this report of a 'visible' DNA test with the finding that Israel's PM is Polish.
Some time ago Benjamin Netanyahu had an actual ancestry test, which uncovered that his genes reveal a mix of Ashkenazi and Sephardi heritage, which is completely unsurprising as his father emigrated from Poland to the Mandate and there met his mother, who had been born in Jerusalem under Ottoman rule.
Netanyahu's father was Polish in the way that South Asians in Idi Amin's Uganda were Ugandan i.e. a member of a deeply resented and persecuted ethnic minority.
So yes, technically he was indeed a Polish national, but the way that this antisemitic podcaster and Xcreter uses the term is rather like referring to a Mayan family living in Boston as 'Irish'.
Would these same a simple vista DNA tests determine that Obama is a native Polynesian from Hawaii?
This is all racist and stupid in equal measure, and unfortunately, unashamedly so. (Let's not even begin to wrangle with the notion of assessing people's territorial rights by relative pigmentation.)
And this is the problem we now have with ideologically-driven discourse emanating from the US on a range of different topics, especially those referencing other parts of the world, for this toxic emulsion of ignorance and thin, low-grade information is steadily seeping out into the wider world and affecting the thinking of everybody who comes into contact with it.
As a boy I read and enjoyed Arthur Koestler's provocative book The Thirteenth Tribe in which the author speculated that Ashkenazis may have descended from the Khazars of the Northern Caucasus — who had mass converted to Judaism in the early medieval period — a notion since debunked by both historians and geneticists.
It remains one of those immensely stimulating yet patently wrong hypotheticals, like Julian Jaynes's bicameral mind: worth reading if you are not the sort of person who systematically believes the last thing you read.
Ironically, Koestler seems to have imagined that by throwing doubt on the semitic origins of European jews he could take the sting out of antisemitism, yet today his theory has been appropriated by numbskull antisemites and used to make out that Israelis are on some fundamental level European settler-colonisers within a territory that has — as any broader historical analysis informs us — been under brutal and restrictive Arab and Turk colonial rule for around 1500 years.
And this when not even half of Jewish-Israeli citizens today have this Ashkenazi heritage which seems to set off the fanatical and chauvinistic simpletons.
No comments:
Post a Comment